Economics bleg
I am writing some economics, and need to make it look more rigorous and convincing. Does anyone have a Windows-compatible version of that really crappy skinny font which is the default for LaTex? I think I can set up a Word template to have infeasibly wide top and bottom margins and almost-but-not-quite-wide-enough-to-be-useful line spacing, but if anyone has a template which emulates the LaTex default that would be cool too as it would save the trouble of fucking up the footnotes manually.
Update: ten seconds, via email. Star man.
From the link:-
ReplyDeletemay create documents which look convincingly like they were the product of the superior typesetting system
Funny how a single phrase can tell you an awful lot about a person, isn't it?
Speaking as someone who has spent a great deal of time angrily screaming at Word 2007, I reckon that an equation editor on which can actually edit equations to your heart's desire, without it fucking them up to the point of computer meltdown, is well worth the inconvenience of having to spend 5 seconds adjusting the margins.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, the crappy font is computer modern.
Larry T
Separating writing from formatting has saved me a lot of time over the years, but each to their own I guess.
ReplyDeleteIronically I opened that computer modern wikipedia page and my boss walked past and launched into a rant on how incredibly ugly it is.
ReplyDeleteTex is very good for equations, certainly better than the word equation editor. Ironically it's bad for text, or at least very very idiosyncratic in its aesthetics.
Jesus, just spotted that I used "ironically" twice there. Sorry, I blame Knuth.
ReplyDeleteI would argue that all economists ought to be forced to work in Word 2003, in order to force them to a) seriously consider whether their equations are absolutely necessary and b) think about the underlying problem enough to get the equation right first time. See the Krugman "Japan's Trap" note linked above, which I happen to know was written shortly after PK switched from WordPerfect to Word.
ReplyDeleteIf you're arguing that Latex is worse than InDesign for page design then fair enough. But compared to Word?
ReplyDeleteRegardless of the TeX vs Word wars, I'd just like to point out that using Computer Modern as *the* LaTeX font has not been standard since, what, 2000 or so. It went out along with sending out DVI files rather than PDF files.
ReplyDeleteMost people (including me) agree that CM is visually a less than ideal font, and TeX has had the ability to use PostScript fonts for years. Any decent TeX distribution that doesn't date from the 20th century will be set up to allow the use of PS/TT fonts with minimal difficulty, and a GUI word processor based on Tex (ie LyX) will make using them basically trivial --- a few minutes of dicking around with dialog box preferences.
As for the very very wide margins, yeah, I don't know what's going on with that. I could understand a justification for the left/right margins in terms of "columns of text that are too wide are difficult to read" or suchlike, but the top/bottom margins?
Fortunately, again, LyX makes changing these trivial.
If changing them is so trivial, why does nobody ever do it?
ReplyDeletewhat would be the point? If you're using LaTex, you want everyone to know you're using LaTex (or more specifically, you want everyone to think you're using TeX).
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can make out, the only reason to not recognise Word as the excellent text editor and layout tool that it is is Microsoft-hatred. Idiots use Word badly; but if you use styles, tables and fields properly, then it is the best tool out of all available tools for anything less straightforward than a letter, or more straightforward than a marketing brochure.
ReplyDelete(one of my previous employers spent months and six-figure sums trying to build an online XML editor so that all their report content could easily be categorised and indexed. When they realised how shit the beta was, they switched to using Word and writing an app that stuck everything in a database based on styles. It worked far better than any attempt at building an online XML editor I've ever seen).
Microsoft are responsible for many bad things. Most of their server products, Windows ME, Vista, IE6 and their competition strategy all come to mind. But Word, Excel and Powerpoint are the finest tools for document creation, data manipulation and presentation creation that there are. And I'm saying that as someone who's used most of the (vaguely mainstream) others.
Most of their server products
ReplyDeleteIT nerds of my acquaintance will grudgingly admit that Active Directory knocks the rest of the competition dead for a multi-user network.
I would argue (with apparent support from actual computer scientists) that Excel is a programming language as much as an application.
ReplyDeleteLyX is what you are looking for. Takes a bit to install, but results in smart-looking stuff with little effort.
ReplyDeleteNathan says, "Hi."
As far as I can make out, the only reason to not recognise Word as the excellent text editor and layout tool that it is is Microsoft-hatred. Idiots use Word badly; but if you use styles, tables and fields properly, then it is the best tool out of all available tools for anything less straightforward than a letter, or more straightforward than a marketing brochure.
ReplyDeleteNo. The reason nobody respects Word compared to TeX is that TeX is arguably one of the best computer programs ever written. It is very likely the best typesetting engine ever implemented. (The InDesign line break algorithm? That's a clone of the TeX line break algorithm. Word couldn't even do up that algorithm's bootlaces.) The figure positioning algorithm is pretty good as well, especially when you compare it to a human typesetter.
The interface is possibly not the best, but from a purely typesetting point of view, I'd rather use TeX than almost anything else.
As to why nobody ever fucks with LaTeX's defaults: they are, after all, the standard defaults of the field they exist in. They are the way they are because that's what LaTeX's users want.
PS. Funnily enough, Leslie Lamport currently works for Microsoft.
I am given to understand that "TeX" should be pronounced to rhyme with "wretch" and "LaTex" with "fat wretch", but how does one pronounce "LyX"?
ReplyDeleteI think the idea that TeX is a work of programming perfection requires one to ignore its many flaws (the macro language is a fucking disaster). Good algorithms, shame about the framework. On the other hand anyone who thinks that Word is good at layout, or text editing, has obviously never used real layout software (did you never stop to ask why book designers don't use it), or real text editing software.
ReplyDeleteIf it gets the job done that's great and I think ease of use is a good thing, but as someone who's had large documents completely fried by Word, and seen templates fuck up for no reason known to man (I typed 'a', and it switched to single columns. Seriously, WTF), I prefer to use something a little more robust for proper work.
When they realised how shit the beta was, they switched to using Word and writing an app that stuck everything in a database based on styles.
Hmm, that story sounds like whoever was responsible for the project didn't know what they were doing. Both solutions are odd. One sounds like the kind of thing a software architect would dream up (they're architects because they were shit at coding, and shit at business analysis, but great at bullshit), the latter sounds like a maintenance nightmare, as it relies upon people using styles consistently/properly. Which Word doesn't exactly make easy, even if people want to, which they never seem to.
Excel is a fine application if used appropriately. People who build full fledged applications in it are asking for trouble though... And its not really the right tool if you're calculations have to be accurate. Which is the problem with quite a lot of these things. Its not so much that they're crap, as they're used inappropriately.
then it is the best tool out of all available tools for anything less straightforward than a letter, or more straightforward than a marketing brochure.
ReplyDeleteIt does, however, sell itself as having a greater range than your upward boundary.
It is also the best tool to encourage the keeping of regular backups, given that the probability of it corrupting your document approaches 1 based upon an equation involving word count and proximity to deadline that is probably best laid out in LaTeX.
(Annoyance with the default margins reflects how styles have changed since the late 1970s, when most people still used typewriters. )
What do you people *do* to Word? I've never had it (at least, in its 2003, 2007 and 2008:Mac incarnations) corrupt a document, or do mad things to the formatting after I've pressed 'a'. And I've mostly used it to work on 100-200 word reports with hundreds of tables and figures.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite easy to *make* people use styles and formats properly: tell them how to do it (which is very very easy: "do not use any of the formatting tools apart from italic and bold - everything else must be done by selecting a style from the menu on the far left, otherwise your report won't upload"), and then set the uploading software so that if they don't do this, then their report won't upload and they have to either fix the styles and formats in their own time or miss their deadline. That sort of thing concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Bums. '100-200 *page* reports'. 200 words would be impressive minimalism.
ReplyDeleteWell I realise that the LaTeX hatred here is purely ideological, so counter-argument is wasted, but the aesthetic arguments are misplaced. It is a fairly trivial matter to use the memoir document class together with a sensible font, and then everything looks *lovely*. Daniel should ask Kieran H about this.
ReplyDeleteMy experience of Word, btw, is quite different from John B's. A particular annoyance is Word's capacity for inconsistent renumbering of dynamic information that you've put into headers or footers. This it does after you've got everything nicely sorted out on the screen, the moment AFTER you press "print".
It's not so much ideological as "why would I ever bother with LaTeX when Word is an extremely useable WYSISYG program which handles all the layout tasks I might possibly want to do, and which is integrated with Excel?", plus the original post which was basically teasing a number actually existing economists who do actually take documents more seriously because they're printed in Computer Modern with big margins (and therefore look like they were written in a university department).
ReplyDeleteI am 100% with John here. Word doesn't randomly corrupt files, and it hasn't given me any formatting problems in the last ten years - I seem to remember from the dim and distant past that Word 95 was annoying when you tried to insert charts into documents, but that's it. I dare say I'd use LaTeX more if I wrote things which had big and complicated equations in them, but life hasn't turned out that way.
The template we used at [Big Four] firm to generate DD reports took a bit of training, but essentially it boiled down to 'don't, whatever you do, ever ever delete a section break or the apocalypse will happen'.
ReplyDelete